England captain Alastair Cook delivered the most entertaining two overs you
will see against India at Trent Bridge

There is something curiously soothing about drawn Tests, with their vaguely soporific sense of deflation, the endless inconsequential singles; a long, slow fade to white. We are all five days older, and nothing has changed except the date. It is a weirdly comforting thought.

And yet life teaches us that permanence is an illusion. Quantum physics teaches us that the universe is in a state of constant flux. You cannot freeze time, and even if you could, you probably would not learn much.

Nothing ever stays the same. This match was billed as a titanic tussle between two of the game’s few remaining superpowers: a swirl of politics and money and culture and Important Things. It ended with the England captain taking what must surely be the only ever Test wicket to follow a Bob Willis impersonation.

You will struggle to find a more entertaining two overs than those Alastair Cook delivered yesterday evening. The first was an over of off-spin – a strictly relative term – clocked at around 43mph. The second, an over of gentle seamers – including his first Test wicket. By that logic, then, Cook’s third over would have consisted of six deliveries at searing express pace. A terrific shame that the match had to end before we could witness it.

What was really going on here? At stumps on Thursday, Stuart Broad was dispatched to tell the media that despite recent failures, Cook was feeling “chirpy”. Now, as Cook ran in flapping his hands uncontrollably in homage to Willis, he was all smiles again. Was this his way of showing us that he was OK? Was this Team England’s attempt to re-engage with their public? Or was it simply the final magnificent flourish of a match that teetered uncontrollably between monotony and madness?

Cook was not the only one undergoing a glorious identity crisis. With two century partnerships for the last wicket, the tail-enders clearly thought they were batsmen. With a pitch as dead as double denim, the groundstaff clearly thought they were embalmers. Yes, it was a dotty few days on the River Trent, the sort that reminds us that while the names and faces may remain constant, cricket is ultimately a game defined by change.

If you were at this ground two years ago, you would have seen Liam Plunkett trotting down the pavilion steps to play a Twenty20 game for Durham. You would have seen Michael Lumb hit his first over for three consecutive fours. You would have seen him start his second over, but not finish it. His first and seventh balls slipped out of his hand: head-high beamers to Riki Wessels. Plunkett was pulled out of the attack by the umpires, reprimanded by the England and Wales Cricket Board, dropped to the second team. In the summer of 2012, Liam Plunkett had literally forgotten how to bowl.

If only Plunkett could have glimpsed his future. Brought on at the Pavilion End yesterday morning, his first delivery was a fast, inswinging yorker that brushed into the pads of M S Dhoni and clattered into the stumps. India were six down and the match was wide open. Plunkett may not have hit the heights of Headingley, but here was another reminder of cricket’s fickle temper.

Three years ago, Stuart Binny turned up at Karnataka’s pre-season nets. He had always been stocky, but without wishing to put too fine a point on it, this time he was stockier than usual. The idea that he was an international all-rounder in the making would have been laughable. His dalliance with the banned Indian Cricket League in 2007 had left him persona non grata, and now time was creeping up on him.

If only Binny could have glimpsed his future. Binny is now 30, but a stone and a half lighter, and Sunil Gavaskar jokes that it was harder to lift him as a baby than it is now. Ostensibly handed an unlikely Test debut for his tidy seam bowling, he instead appeared to be labouring under the impression he was Kapil Dev. His innings of 78 was the performance of the day. Not bad for a man who looked like going down in history as Roger Binny’s fat son.

So when Cook wakes up this morning and remembers that for all his fun and games, he is still in the worst batting crisis of his career, he might benefit from the broader perspective. Take a snapshot of yesterday’s play and you would have seen two Test cricketers of outstanding promise, and one decidedly out of his depth.

But snapshots never give you the full picture. Three years ago Cook was the golden boy of English cricket, an Ashes winner, a force of timelessness and effortless calm. Perhaps we thought that time would last forever. But nothing ever does.